Scholars and Artists
Scholars & Artists are listed in alphabetical order by last name.
Robert Alter
Robert Alter is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University.
Professor Alter has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-two published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. He has devoted book-length studies to Fielding, Stendhal, and the self-reflexive tradition in the novel. Books by him have been translated into eight different languages. Among his publications over the past twenty years are: Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The World of Biblical Literature (1992) and Hebrew and Modernity (1994), Imagined Cities (Yale, 2005) and Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (Norton, 2007) and Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible,(Princeton 2010). His newest book, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes a Translation with Commentary will be published by Norton later this year. In 2009, he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters. Additional information on Dr. Alter’s work may be found at http://jewishstudies.berkeley.edu/faculty.html#alter
Mara Altman
Mara Altman received her M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in 2005. A former staff writer at the Village Voice, she has also written for the New York Times and New York. She lives in Brooklyn.
Robby Adler Peckerar
10/27 @ 7 PM Out of the Classroom and Onto the Field: Jews & Soccer
Robby Adler Peckerar joined CU this summer as an assistant professor of Jewish Literature and Culture in Jewish Studies and the German and Slavic Languages and Literatures departments. He earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Adler Peckerar concentrated on Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature and completed course work in Modern Standard and Levantine Arabic.
He is a translator of Yiddish and Hebrew short fiction and poetry and also an avid watcher of television and film. Robby also served as the former director of education at the National Yiddish Book Center where he was the translation editor of PaknTreger magazine and created and ran the Steiner Summer Program in Yiddish Studies. In addition to his time in Berkeley, he studied in Vilnius, Lithuania and Berlin. Originally from the Washington, D.C. area, Robby now calls Denver home with his partner Naomi and five-year old son, Tomek.
Jerry Aronson
1/9 @ 7 PM MoVeRs at the MoViEs: “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg"
Academy Award nominated director Jerry Aronson spent 25 years accumulating more than 120 hours of film on Allen Ginsberg, resulting in a comprehensive portrait of one of America's greatest poets.
Elissa Barrett
10/22 @ 7 PM SMASHING THE IDOLS: Teach In and the Launch of MoVeRs
10/23 @ 7 PM Social Justice Shabbat with Jewish Mosaic
Elissa Barrett is the Executive Director for the Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA) in Los Angeles. Founded in 1999 by Jewish Angelenos seeking to assert an authentic progressive Jewish presence in the campaigns for social justice in Southern California, home to the nation’s second largest city and second largest Jewish community, PJA educates, advocates and organizes on issues of peace, equality, diversity and justice. Over the past ten years, PJA has created a new model of Jewish community organizing, and has reinvigorated the progressive Jewish landscape in Los Angeles. In 2005, PJA opened a San Francisco Bay Area chapter.
PJA is a new kind of Jewish organization, one that serves as a vehicle connecting Jews to the critical social justice issues of the day, to the life of the cities in which they live, and to the Jewish tradition of working for tikkun olam. They believe that to kvetch is human, to act...divine. Elissa Barrett joined PJA as their Executive Director in early 2009. A University of Michigan Law School graduate, Ms. Barrett has worked as an international human rights lawyer in Israel and South Africa before becoming a corporate litigator in Los Angeles.
In 2002, she left Stroock & Stroock & Laven LLP to work for Bet Tzedek Legal Services, an organization that provides legal representation to low-income L.A. residents. There she fought against slum housing and worked to pass legislation for safe, affordable housing for the poor, disabled and elderly. In 2007, she became the organization's founding pro bono director, placing pro bono legal cases with corporate attorneys. That same year, she launched the Holocaust Survivors Justice Network, which helps survivors claim monies from a new reparation fund in Germany.
Neshama Carlebach
5/27 @ 7:30 PM Higher and Higher: Neshama Carlebach in Concert
Neshama Carlebach, one of the leading superstars in Jewish entertainment, is continuing the legacy established by her father Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, whose deep spirituality and love of all humanity filled every song he wrote and touched every person he encountered as he changed the face of Jewish music.
Ira Chernus
2/18 @ 7 PM What Would Spinoza Have Said? Today's MoVeRs Speak Out
Ira Chernus is a professor in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He began his academic career studying the history of religions, in particular the history of Judaism, with special emphasis on rabbinic Judaism and Jewish mysticism. During the early 1980s he became active in the antinuclear movement and decided to apply his academic skills as a historian of religions to studying the cultural and symbolic meanings of nuclear weapons. That led him to a whole new direction for his research and teaching, a focus on issues of war and peace, especially in the United States, which in turn led to a larger interest in U.S. foreign and national security policies and in the peace movement as a counter-voice to the mainstream views on these issues. His main interest is in the cultural construction of discourse about these topics, though he also closely follows political and economic concerns too.
He has recently completed a large project on President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his impact on our discourse. This project gives special attention to Eisenhower's policies toward, and talk about, nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament. He has also recently published Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, a book about the connections between conservative religion, "moral values," and national security policy in the Bush administration and among its supporters. A few years ago he published a textbook, American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, which covers the intellectual history of nonviolence since colonial times. It provides useful background for understanding the antinuclear and peace movements during the cold war. His current research is on the origins of the national insecurity state during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In addition to his academic writing, he has for many years written for the popular press, beginning in the 1980s with a regular op-ed column in the Colorado Daily and occasional op-eds for the Boulder Daily Camera. His columns have also appeared around the county in papers like Atlanta Constitution, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, and Denver Post.
Bill Cohen
11/1 @ 7 PM Film screening and discussion of "REFUSENIK"
Refusenik advocacy is only one of William Cohen’s many accomplishments as an attorney and lifetime human rights activist. In Boulder, however, he is a hero to hundreds of Russian Jews rescued by the organization he founded in 1985. Bill served as president of Boulder Action for Soviet Jewry, a resettlement agency for Soviet Jews in Boulder, until it ceased operations in 1994. Between October 1989 and September 1994, he made nine missions to the former Soviet Union, including Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Tajikistan, to investigate status of anti-Semitism, assist refugees and Refuseniks, assist in representation of political prisoners, inspect jail and pretrial detention center conditions, and conduct legal education programs on human rights in the criminal justice system.
In 1991 he became CEO and Chief Counsel for The Center for Human Rights Advocacy in Boulder, a public interest law firm dedicated to promoting and protecting human rights in the former Soviet Union (FSU) through advocacy, research and public and professional education. Since 1994 he has served on the Anti-Defamation League, Denver Region, Board of Directors (currently Emeritus member) and has been co-Chair of Civil Rights Committee, a member of Hate Crimes Monitoring Committee and Working Group on Nature of Prejudice and Hate.
He has been honored by United Nations Association of Colorado, Boulder Chapter with the Human Rights Award in 1998; the ADL Mountain States Civil Rights Award for 1997; the UCSJ Michael J. Tryson Memorial Award for legal advocacy; and 1993 Boulder County Bar Association Community Service Award.
Stephen Cope
4/21 @ 5 PM George Oppen: Negative Culpability and the Poetics of Veracity
Stephen Cope is the editor of George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (University of California Press, 2007), and a founding editor of Essay Press. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Jacket, The Germ, Sagetrieb, Mirage: A Period(ical), XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, and elsewhere. Cope received his PhD from UC San Diego in 2005, and has since taught at UCSD, Drake University, Ohio University, Ithaca College, and the University at Buffalo, as well as serving on the faculty of Bard College's Workshop in Language and Thinking. His chapbooks include Versiones Vertiges (Meow Press, 1999), and his poem “Bellerophonic Sonnet” earned a PIP-Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in 2005. He is currently completing a manuscript of poetry entitled “Bellerophonic Letters” and is at work on a critical book on literary form and cultural politics in 20th century literature. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he produces "Conference of the Birds," a weekly podcast of cross-cultural music and poetic form.
Gregg Drinkwater
1/30 @ 7 PM Film screening and discussion of "Times of Harvey Milk"
4/13@ 7 PM Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible
Gregg Drinkwater is Jewish Mosaic’s director and one of the organization’s three co-founders. Prior to joining Jewish Mosaic, Drinkwater worked in nonprofit communications, at a daily newspaper in Moscow, and as the news editor for San Francisco-based PlanetOut Inc., publishers of Gay.com and PlanetOut.com, the world’s most popular LGBT Web sites.
He is the co-editor, with Dr. David Shneer and Rabbi Joshua Lesser, of the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Biblle (NYU Press, Sept. 2009), inspired by the online Torah commentary project launched by Jewish Mosaic in 2006, in collaboration with the World Congress of GLBT Jews.
Drinkwater has served as a volunteer, board member or advisor to a wide range of Jewish, LGBT, and social justice organizations and is currently president of Limmud Colorado. Drinkwater earned his B.S. and M.A. degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also devoted several years to a Ph.D. in history.
Sidney Goldfarb
Sidney Goldfarb is a Harvard College-educated American poet and experimental playwright, whose work continues the tradition of poetic theater. Goldfarb co-founded the acclaimed Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1975, serving as its first director. He continues to teach here today. He is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1968), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1970), a Goethe Foundation Grant (1984), and multiple grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. His books of poetry and poetic theater include Speech, for Instance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), Messages (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), Curve in the Road (Halty-Ferguson, 1980) and The Rushes of Tulsa and Other Plays (Barrytown-Station Hill, 2008). In addition to his poetry he has written numerous plays including The Transposed Heads (adapted with Julie Taymor from the novel by Thomas Mann, 1984), The Rushes of Tulsa(1999) and Bad Women (2000). Additional information about Sidney Goldfarb may be found at www.colorado.edu/English/faculty/facpages/goldfarb.shtml.
Shirley Goldstein
11/1 @ 7 PM Film screening and discussion of "REFUSENIK"
About Shirley Goldstein from Laura Bialis – writer, director and producer for "REFUSENIK":
"My first feature documentary — TAK FOR ALT: Survival of a Human Spirit – is about Holocaust survivor turned Civil Rights activist Judy Meisel. I made it with two friends during film school, and the film ended up being shown on public television and is still used all over the US for Holocaust and tolerance education. During a screening of that film in Omaha, Nebraska, I was approached by two members of the Omaha Jewish community. They wanted to bring my attention to another activist — Shirley Goldstein."
"From mere appearances, Shirley appears to be a normal mid-West Jewish grandmother. But she is one of the amazing activists that ran this movement. She actually helped us with the first seed grant and contacts to get the project going. So I can’t really take credit for the idea...it was brought to me."
Zilla Goodman
1/21 @ 7 PM Political Powerhouses: Three Women Who Did Not Stand Idly By
Zilla Goodman is senior instructor and coordinator of the Hebrew Language & Literature Program and member of the Jewish Studies Executive Committee at CU-Boulder. She received her doctorate in Modern Hebrew literature from the University of Cape Town, South Africa and has taught Hebrew language, Hebrew literature, and Jewish culture at a number of universities in the United States and abroad.
Professor Goodman’s work focuses on gender in modern Hebrew literature, diaspora literatures, and on notions of place and space in Jewish culture.
Rabbi Victor Gross
10/22 @ 7 PM SMASHING THE IDOLS: Teach-In and Launch of MoVeRs
Rabbi Gross is the co-Rabbi of Congregation Pardes Levavot: A Jewish Renewal Congregation in Boulder. He received his Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley and is a member of the Va'ad of ALEPH: Alliance for the Jewish Renewal's Ordinations Program. He also serves as a member of the faculty of ALEPH, teaching history and Jewish thought. He is also a member of the Religious Studies faculty at Naropa University and the author of Educating for Reverence: The Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel .
Rabbi Gross will be highlighting A.J. Heschel as a MoVeR for the teach-in and launch on 10/22. Heschel was considered to be one of America's most distinguished spiritual voices. Often referred to as "the moral spokesperson" of the Jewish community in America on issues of race and opposition to the war in Vietnam. He represented the Jewish people at Vatican II which led to the decision to deny Jewish guilt in the crucifixion. Heschel's writings were the first effort to bring the legacy of mysticism and Hasidism into a modern spiritual idiom.
Orly Halpern
10/22 @ 7 PM SMASHING THE IDOLS: Teach-In and Launch of MoVeRs
Orly Halpern is a Jewish American Israeli war correspondent (pictured here in one of Saddam's spider holes!). She is also an Arabic speaker who lived in Baghdad and reported for a year during the Iraq war and covered the second intifada driving her sedan across the West Bank.
When she left Iraq she became the Middle East correspondent for The Jerusalem Post for which she traveled across the Arab and Muslim world learning about the politics, the people, and their views on Jews and Israel. She developed a particular interest in Jewish communities living amongst the Arabs. (She has spent Passover with the last Afghan Jew in Kabul and with Bahraini Jews in Manama.)
Today Ms. Halpern is a freelance writer and a reporter for Toronto's Globe and Mail. She has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines, including US News and World Report, Dallas Morning News, Jewish Daily Forward, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Ha’aretz, McClatchy Newspapers, Hadassah Magazine, and Homemakers (Canada). During the Second Lebanon War she reported for US News and was an analyst on Fox News. In 2007, she traveled to Rwanda to write about the empowerment of women since the genocide. She learned that many of the Tutsi victims identify with the Jews.
Ms. Halpern joined Twitter this year and quickly became one of the Most Influential Jewish Twitters (#8 out of the top 100, according to the JTA.) She's at http://www.twitter.com/JerusalemBureau.
Orly is currently working on a book about her year in Iraq reporting for the Globe and Mail, US News and World Report, The New York Sun, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Dallas Morning News - all the while hiding her Jewish Israeli identity from the locals she met across the country: whether Shiites in Sadr City, Sunnis in Falluja, or Saddam’s extended family in Tikrit.
Rachel Havrelock
2/24@ 4 PM The Lost History of Jewish Anti-Nationalism
Rachel Havrelock has a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a Hebrew Bible scholar whose research focuses on biblical narrative, symbolic geography and reception of the Bible. Her recently completed manuscript, River Jordan: The Myth of a Dividing Line, considers the Jordan River as a border which both divides and connects in texts from the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple period, Talmud and early Christianity. The final chapter shows the relationship of religious representations of the Jordan to the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict by presenting evidence from ethnographic and archival research in the region. Rachel is the co-author of Women on the Biblical Road (University Press of America, 1996); a featured exegete in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (Union of Reform Judaism Press, 2007); and the author of articles concerning gender in the Hebrew Bible.
Matthew Hoffman
2/21 @ 7PM Screening and after film discussion of "Arguing the World"
2/22 @ 4PM Jewish Communists in 1930s New York
2/22 @ 7PM Jesus and Paul as Radical Jews
Matthew Hoffman holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from the Joint Doctoral Program at the University of California, Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union. He is currently assistant professor of Judaic Studies and History at Franklin & Marshall College, where he teaches courses on Jewish history and culture. Among his many interests are European and American Jewish history; modern secular Jewish ideologies and movements, especially Yiddish culture and literature; and Jewish representations of Jesus and Christianity. He is currently working on a study of Yiddish-speaking communists in American in the year before World War Two.
Professor Hoffman has published and presented papers on a number of topics, especially on how modern Jewish writers and artists have approached the figure of Jesus, and his book on the subject, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Standford University Press, 2007). Most recently, Hoffman has published articles on the culture of Yiddish-speaking communists, including "The Red Divide:The Conflict between Communists and their Opponents in the American Yiddish Press," accepted in American Jewish History (2010).
Daniel Itzkovitz
4/20 @ 7 PM Obama, Sarah Silverman and Jewish-Black Relations
Daniel Itzkovitz is Associate Professor of American literature and culture. He has published articles on Jewish studies, queer theory, film, and American literature, and is the editor of Fannie Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life (Duke University Press, 2004) and Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (Columbia University Press, 2003), which he co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Ann Pellegrini. He is currently working on a book about Jews and twentieth century American culture, and has recently edited a special issue of the interdisciplinary Jewish studies journal Shofar on Jews and race in America.
Yael Kanarek
11/9 @ 7 PM “The Textwork of Yael Kanarek: Visualizing Language
Yael Kanarek has developed a unique vocabulary of networked interfaces using photography, text, sculpture, and performance. She was the recipient of the Netizens Webprize and the CNRS/UNESCO Lewis Carroll Prix Argos in France. Kanarek is the founder of Upgrade! International, a network of gatherings concerning art, technology and culture (www.theupgrade.net). Her work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, The Kitchen, The Drawing Center, American Museum of the Moving Image, and Ronald Feldman Gallery. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Destruction & Mending, the second chapter of World of Awe. She is currently an honorary senior fellow at Eyebeam Atelier and represented by bitforms gallery.
Steve Katz
Steve Katz has written and published continuously since the self-published novella, The Lestriad, in 1962. His books have appeared from Holt, Random House, Knopf, Ithaca House, Sun & Moon, and Bamberger Books. His collection of stories, Creamy & Delicious (1970), was mentioned in Larry McCaffery's list of the 100 greatest books of the 20th century where it was named, "the most extreme and perfectly executed fictional work to emerge from the Pop Art scene of the late 60s." His other works include The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968), Saw (1972), Moving Parts (1977), Wier & Pounce (1984), Florry of Washington Heights (1987), Antonello's Lion (2005), the collections of stories Stolen Stories (1984) and 43 Fictions (1992), the books of poems Cheyenne River Wild Track (1973) and Journalism (1990), and the screenplay Grassland (Hex) (1972). His 1995 novel, Swanny's Ways, won an American Book Award. His upcoming memoir, Time’s Wallet will be published this fall by Counterpath Press.
Steven Katz was one of the founders of Fiction Collective (FC2) and he started the short-lived PIIF (Projects In Innovative Fiction) with Walter Abish, Clarence Major, and Michael Stephens. He taught creative writing and literature at Cornell University, Brooklyn College, Queens College, The University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, The University of Notre Dame, and The University of Colorado in Boulder, from which he retired in 2003. Additional information on Steve Katz may be found at www.colorado.edu/English/faculty/facpages/katz.shtml
Edward Kritzler
Edward Kritzler is a historian and a former New York-based reporter. He lives in Kingston, Jamaica. A recognized authority on Jamaica, has authored hundreds of articles on the island and in his 10 year tenure with the Jamaica Tourist Board, he was in charge of arranging and touring members of the foreign press and broadcast media. Serving as Jamaica’s film liaison officer, he was responsible for over a dozen feature films and network documentaries.
Jay Michaelson
3/8 @ 7 PM Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism
3/9 @ 7 PM Ten Reasons Why Gay Rights is a Religious Issue
Jay Michaelson is the author of three books and two hundred articles on the intersections of Judaism, spirituality, sexuality, and law. A columnist for the Forward, Huffington Post, Zeek, Tikkun, Hadassah, and Reality Sandwich magazines, Jay’s work on the inclusion of sexual minorities in religious communities has been published in anthologies including “Mentsh: On Being Jewish and Queer” (2004), “Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice” (2007), “Jews and Sex” (2008) and “Torah Queeries” (2009); publications including the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law and Duke Law Review; and featured in The New York Times and NPR. His gay-themed fiction and poetry has been published in Ganymede, Blithe House Quarterly, Zeek, and in anthologies including “Best Gay Poetry 2008” and “Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling.” In addition to his writing, Jay is also the executive director of Nehirim, a national organization which builds community for GLBT Jews, partners, and allies. He holds a J.D. from Yale, and is completing his Ph.D in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has held teaching positions at Boston University Law School, City College of New York, and Yale University. His most recent book is “Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism.”
Menachem Mor
2/2 @ 7 PM “Bar Kochba: Inventing Jewish Radicalism
Professor Menachem Mor is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, at the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. He was born in Lodz Poland and immigrated to Israel 1950.
He holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Haifa, in the Department of Jewish History. A second MA degree in Religious Studies from Duke University, and a Ph. D in Jewish History from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Professor Mor has served as a faculty member in the Jewish History Department at the University of Haifa since 1973. From 1987-1993, he was the Philip Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at Creighton University, Omaha NE.
Specializing in ancient Jewish history during the Second Temple Period, his research is devoted to the political history of the period and the social structure of the population of the Land of Israel. His research has focused on a comprehensive study of the Jewish Revolts in the Ancient world, in particular the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, featured in his book The Bar-Kokhba Revolt: Its Extent and Effect (In Hebrew).
His research of the people and ethnic groups who lived in the Land of Israel is summarized in a book dedicated mainly to the Samaritan sect: From Samaria to Shechem: The Samaritan Sect in the Ancient Period (In Hebrew).
He also published bibliographical collections (with Uriel Rappaport) covering the extensive works on the Second temple period and numerous articles in the field of Ancient Jewish History.
Alan Morinis
4/11 @ 9:45AM “Everyday Holiness: Living the Path of Mussar with Alan Morinis
Alan Morinis is an anthropologist, filmmaker, writer, and student of spiritual traditions. He is an active interpreter of the teachings and practices of the Mussar tradition and regularly gives lectures and workshops. Born and raised in a culturally Jewish but non-observant home, he studied anthropology at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. His doctoral thesis was published by Oxford University Press as Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition.
Alan has written books and produced feature films, television dramas and documentaries and has taught at several universities. Although he took a deep journey into Hindu and Buddhist thought and practice, for the past seven years the nearly-lost Jewish spiritual discipline of Mussar has been his passion, a journey recorded in the book Climbing Jacob’s Ladder (Broadway 2002). His guide to Mussar practice, entitled Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar, was published in May 2007. He lives in Vancouver, BC, with his wife of over 30 years, Bev Spring.
Josh Rose
10/22 @ 7 PM SMASHING THE IDOLS: Teach-In and Launch of MoVeRs
Joshua Rose is a Rabbi at Congregation Har HaShem in Boulder. He loves to guide people in their discovery or rediscovery of Jewish tradition and learning. His path to the rabbinate led him through a master's degree in theology, political advocacy for a Jewish organization in Washington D.C., travel in India and high school teaching - experiences he weaves into his rabbinic work. Rabbi Rose lives in Boulder with his wife Channah, a lawyer, and their young son, Eliav.
William Safran
Thursdays @ 7 PM through March 4-25, 20102 Seismic Shifts: Modern Jewish Ideologies and Movements
William Safran is professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research has focused on comparative and French politics and on the politics of nationalism, ethnicity, and related subjects. He has written numerous articles and published twelve books, most recently Politics in Europe (4th ed., 2007), The French Polity (7th ed., 2008) and Transnational Migrations (2009). He has taught at City University of New York, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Santiago de Compostella, Spain and the universities of Bordeaux, Grenoble, and Nice in France. He is the founding editor of the quarterly Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.
Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
2/18 @ 7PM What Would Spinoza Have Said? Today's MoVeRs Speak Out
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, better known as "Reb Zalman," was born in Zholkiew, Poland, in 1924. Raised largely in Vienna, his family was forced to flee the Nazi oppression in 1938. After almost three years without roots, they finally landed in New York City in 1941, settling in Brooklyn, where young Zalman enrolled in the yeshiva of the Lubavitcher Hasidim. He was ordained by Lubavitch in 1947. He later received his Master of Arts degree in the Psychology of Religion in 1956 from Boston University and a Doctor of Hebrew Letters degree from Hebrew Union College in 1968.
He taught at the University of Manitoba, Canada, from 1956 to 1975 and was Professor of Jewish Mysticism and Psychology of Religion at Temple University until his early retirement in 1987, when he was named professor emeritus. In 1995, he accepted the World Wisdom Chair at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, officially retiring from that post in 2004. Throughout his long career, Reb Zalman has been an unending resource for the world religious community.
He is the father of the Jewish Renewal and Spiritual Eldering movements, an active teacher of Hasidism and Jewish Mysticism, and a participant in ecumenical dialogues throughout the world, including the widely influential dialogue with the Dalai Lama, documented in the book, The Jew in the Lotus. One of the world's foremost authorities on Hasidism, he is the author of the new book, A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters (co-authored by Netanel Miles-Yepez), and on Jewish law, he has written, Integral Halachah: Transcending and Including (with Daniel Siegel). Reb Zalman currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, and continues to be active in mentoring his many students the world over.
Elizabeth Sears
Elizabeth Sears is an art historian specializing in medieval art and iconography and professor and director of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan. Her first book, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton University Press, 1986), won the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. She has also edited and contributed essays to Edgar Wind, The Religious Symbolism of Michaelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object (University of Michigan Press, 2002). Dr. Sears has received a number of research fellowships, from such institutions as the Getty Research Institute and the British School at Rome, and has twice been a visiting fellow at Oxford University.
In addition, she has been the editor of Gesta, the journal published by the International Center of Medieval Art, and has served on the Center’s board of directors. Dr. Sears has taught art history at Princeton University, the University of Hamburg, and currently, at the University Michigan, where she has been since 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from Duke University and later earned her PhD from Yale University.
While in residence at the American Academy in Berlin, Sears worked on a book project on the influence and critical reception of Aby Warburg, the influential German art historian who founded the Warburg Library of Cultural Sciences in Hamburg in the early twentieth century as both a private collection and a resource for public education.
David Shneer
10/22 @ 7 PM SMASHING THE IDOLS: Teach In and the Launch of MoVeRs
11/1 @ 7 PM Film Screening and Discussion of "REFUSENIK"
4/13@ 7 PM Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible
David Shneer is an associate professor of History and the director of the Program in Jewish Studies at CU-Boulder. Called a "taboo-breaking scholar" by Tikkun magazine, Shneer's work concentrates on modern Jewish society and culture, especially Yiddish culture, Russian Jewish history, and Jews and sexuality. He is the former director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver. His books include Queer Jews, finalist for the Lambda Literary award, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, which has sparked discussion in publications like the Economist and the Jerusalem Post.
His newest book project, Bearing Witness: Soviet Jewish Photographers, World War II & the Holocaust (Rutgers, 2010), looks at the lives and works of two dozen World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front. He has lived and worked as a scholar and writer in Russia, Germany, and Israel and has written for the New York Times, Huffington Post, Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post as well as magazines dedicated to Jewish life and culture, including Forward, Pakntreger, Jewcy, and Nextbook. Shneer has taught or been a scholar-in-residence at the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Davis, and at the University of Illinois, the National Yiddish Book Center, the University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
He has been named educational consultant of the Genesis Philanthropy Group's Davai! program, which supports programs to build Jewish identity among global Russian Jewry, serves as consultant to numerous Jewish agencies on questions of contemporary Jewish identity, and serves on the board of directors of the Association for Jewish Studies. He speaks Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German.
Anna Shternshis
11/1 @ 7 PM Film Screening and Discussion of "REFUSENIK"
11/2 @ 12:30 PM Evacuation & Escape of Soviet Jews during WWII
11/2 @ 7 PM Between Shtetl and the Red Hammer: Contemporary Yiddish Music in Russia
Anna Shternshis is an assistant professor of Yiddish and Transnational and Diasporic Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. Born in Moscow, she received her first degree in Russian History and Jewish Studies from Russian State University of Humanities in 1996. She then studied at the Yiddish Teacher's Seminar at Oxford Institute for Yiddish studies, where she received a Yiddish Teaching Diploma in 1997, and at Oxford University, where she received her Doctoral degree in Modern Languages and Literatures in 2000.
Shortly after that she started her career as an assistant professor of Yiddish Language and Literatures at the German Department of the University of Toronto. Shternshis is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). She is currently working on two book projects. One is devoted to the Jewish daily life in the Soviet Union during 1930s-1980s, and the other to the evacuation of Soviet Jews during World War II.
Amy Stein
Amy Stein has been the Community Director of the Boulder Anti-Defamation League office since April 2007. Prior to this position, she was with ADL in San Francisco and Seattle in both professional and lay capacities. A graduate of Brandeis, Amy is Chair of the Boulder Human Relations Commission and serves on the civil rights and diversity committees at CU and for the city of Boulder.
Anna Torres
1/23 @ 7 PM MoVeRs at the MoViEs: "Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman"
Anna (Khane-Libe) Torres is a community muralist from the Bronx, New York. She has studied art at RISD and Swarthmore College, taught mural-making to young people in Philadelphia and Boston, and founded a public art collective in 2005. She has designed the sets for two Yiddish theater productions at Harvard, including a full-scale opera, "Shulamis." She grew up in the Amalgamated Cooperatives, one of the 'Three Bronx Utopias' built by the labor movement. Currently she is pursuing a masters in Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, focusing on Yiddish literature.
Rabbi Yisroel Wilhelm
10/22 @ 7 PM SMASHING THE IDOLS: Teach-In and Launch of MoVeRs
Rabbi Yisroel Wilhelm was born and raised in London, England. It was there that he developed a love for Cricket, Tottenham, and of course, Torah. After completing his exams, he studied in the Chabad Yeshiva in Kiryat Gat, Israel and then came to America to begin his Rabbinical training. Rabbi Wilhelm received his ordination at the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn, NY. After meeting and marrying Leah, he became the program director for a Jewish teen travel camp in New Jersey and then a two-year stint as Youth Director for The Shul in Milwaukee, WI. Rabbi Wilhelm and Leah are the proud parents of four children, and hundreds of CU students who call Chabad their home.
Carol Zemel
11/16 @ 7 PM Radical Artists: Jewish Art in Diaspora
Zemel joined the faculty of York University in Toronto, Canada in the Department of Visual Arts in 2000 as professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History. Prior to York, she taught at Concordia University, Temple University (Philadelphia), Dartmouth College and the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she chaired the Art History Department from 1997-2000.
Professor Zemel's areas of research and publications include 19th and 20th-century European art, the modern art market, feminism in the arts, Jewish visual culture and diaspora studies. An authority on the work of Vincent Van Gogh, her books include The Formation of a Legend - Van Gogh Criticism 1890-1920 (UMI Research Press, 1980) and Van Gogh's Progress: Utopia and Modernity in Late Nineteenth-Century Art (University of California Press, 1997). Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Art History, Artscanada, Art in America, Jong Holland and several scholarly anthologies. She served as co-editor of RACAR (Revue d'art canadienne/Canadian Art Review) from 1995-98.
In 2000/01, Dr. Zemel was a Fellow at the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, engaged in completing a book titled Graven Images: Visual Culture and Modern Jewish History. With Professors Shelley Hornstein (York University) and Reesa Greenberg (Concordia University), she is co-founder and co-director of Project Mosaica, a web-based exploration of Jewish cultural expression in the arts.